Re: Is it necessary to distinguish inclusiveness in possessive markers?
From: | Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> |
Date: | Sunday, January 25, 2004, 17:40 |
Quoting Trebor Jung <treborjung@...>:
> Merhaba!
>
> My conlang Tsaan /tsa:n/ has a pronoun system like this:
> I
> we (excluding the listener)
> we (including the listener)
> you
> yall
> he/she
> they(?I'll think about it)
>
> Is it necessary to include the feature of inclusiveness in possessive
> markers? So do you say 'That's our-EXCL new house' vs. 'That's our-INCL new
> house', or is that necessary? Could one tell from context the intended
> meaning? In this case it's pretty obvious, but are there cases where context
> cannot be used to determine the meaning?
I would expect a language that makes the incl~excl distinction in personal
pronouns also to make it also in possessive ones, but it's hardly _necessary_.
You can always disambiguate by circumlocutions if it's critical in context -
just as you do in a lang like English which doesn't do the incl~excl
distinction at all.
Does that "he/she" cover also "it", or do you have something particularly evil
brewing?
ObMyConlang: The only of my conlangs with an incl~excl distinction, Steienzh,
does uphold it with possessives. But then, from the POV of Steienzh grammar,
possessive pronouns are just the possessive case of personal ones.
Andreas
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